Episode Details

This radio drama uses AI-generated writing, voices, music, sound effects and artwork. All spoken performances in this edition use ElevenLabs V4.

After a Sirkeci freight clerk is strangled and his death is filed as a robbery, why does his widow bring his hidden book to a detective instead of the police?

Read the story and the full transcript: https://matezz.com/episodes/the-nickel-war-istanbul-confidential/

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

Istanbul, January 1942. In rooms above a glass-roofed arcade, the detective Kemal Arslan reads the evening papers while his friend Demir clips them. One small item bothers him: a clerk from the Sirkeci freight yard has been strangled, and the police call it a thieves' job, although the thieves took a purse and a coat but left the one man who had weighed and signed every ton of chrome bound west. Next morning, in a Pera hotel lobby, the proprietress Madlen introduces a broker who moves a foreign mission's freight through the yard. He is courteous and generous with coffee. That evening the clerk's widow, Naciye, climbs the stair with a bundle wrapped twice in oilcloth. Her husband kept a private weight-book in pencil, told no one what was in it, and said only that the yard was heavier than its books. She would rather put it in Arslan's hands than the police's. Then an inspector of National Security summons Arslan and tells him the case is closed, because the chrome convoys outrank one dead bookkeeper. If the file is shut by order, who needed it shut, and what did a careful man's pencil leave behind?

From the series Istanbul Confidential: a real wartime Istanbul case reimagined as a classic espionage noir radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast with an original score and sound design.

Loosely inspired by a real Istanbul case of the 1940s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including a yard clerk and his widow, a hotel keeper, a freight broker, a night watchman, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the freight yard, the hotel and the liaison office named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: Istanbul, January 1942 — with the Sirkeci freight yard, a Pera hotel and a liaison office above the Pera post office.

Chapters:
0:00 Evening Papers Above the Arcade
1:28 Coffee in the Pera Lobby
3:16 A Widow Climbs the Stair
5:20 Pencil Figures Past Midnight
7:04 A Summons from the Ministry
8:47 The Watchman at the Chain
10:43 Hats in Hand, Again
12:20 Return to the Midnight Gate
14:05 Cold Tea and Two Facts
16:25 Dusk by the Water Tower
18:01 Morning Lamplight at Tahsin's Desk
19:41 Black Coffee, Days Later
21:28 A Samovar Hissing at Midnight
22:29 The Lantern Is Lit Tonight
24:38 Near Midnight, Brass and Coffee
27:00 Before the Shutters Close

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #NoirMystery #AudioDrama